Do you think that mental health resources for autistic people require improvement (especially in terms of support at work?)

I'm possibly going to be divisive here but it is something I firmly believe about a few professions in the UK.

Training
Much like teacher training, we allow some therapists to become therapists with lower qualification levels than many other countries. 

Where Germany for example requires both an undergraduate and masters degree in psychology, followed with a practise exam to become licensed the UK's requirements are less rigorous. Like teaching there is 'post-graduate level study' required, but this is often far less in terms of learning and development than a full on Masters degree.  

I honestly believe that like teaching, we're undertraining many of those who are registered with BACP. My assessment having looked at the accredited courses and the curricula is that we're sacrificing the general to the specific. So, instead of understanding the larger context in which one particular set of therapeutic tools exist and the development of said tools, trainees are basically given training on only the set of tools in which they wish to qualify. 

To explain that in a way that is more practical - you could conceivably have a therapist trained in CBT, but not qualified to deliver other forms of counselling. Let alone, have an understanding of how CBT should be tailored for those people who are not neurotypical.

'Evidence'
Much of the evidence upon which the NHS, various NHS Trusts, and the Department of Health and Social Care base their decisions upon is flawed at best. As an example, I received a course of CBT on the NHS some years ago. The therapist claimed in the report to my GP that the CBT had been 'satisfactorily concluded'. Now, to me this was nonsense but it did open my eyes to something especially when something similar occurred later on in life. I was on a course of 12 counselling sessions which I left after 10. My reasoning was simply that I was not getting from the process much of use or help. The letter to the GP simply stated that 'client no longer required the service'.

In both instances these therapies were not run directly by the NHS but a private organisations who take money from the NHS in order to run services. These service are constantly under threat of having the contracts removed from them and given to a better functioning private service. 

Connect this to the way in which two unsuccessful (by my definition) therapies were reported to my GP (and thus the NHS), and you immediately begin to see how their statements could been seen as reporting success. In the case of the CBT, I completed the course but still had some pretty severe symptoms of depression. In the case of the counselling I gave up early because I couldn't really see the progress I had made. To me that meant both had failed. To an NHS administrator who hasn't and never will see treatment notes or take a patient centred approach, well it's easy to see how those two statements can be read as the treatments being 'successful'.

This is honestly how I believe the NHS still manages to conclude that ineffective treatments are effective. It's certainly my working theory on why CBT is still held in high regard by the NHS despite meta-analysis and a multitude of studies showing high relapse rates and generally low efficacy of the therapy.

GPs
At one point in time a GP would have been a doctor that you always see. It would have been the same person who had a good understanding of your patient history and would have had a 'feel' for you as a person. Mostly, it's a revolving door of different doctors who rarely have the time to conduct a full look over a patient's history notes. To my mind this creates a major problem. When you are constantly seeing doctors who don't know you from anyone else there is no way of them knowing what you as a person are like. Do you constantly downplay issues? Do you have a low threshold for pain? Do you have Alexithymia? They can't and often don't know.

Combine this with the relatively poor level of training that GPs get in mental health and neurodiversity, well they fail to function effectively as gatekeepers to more advanced services like psychiatry. To clarify here I don't mean gatekeepers in a derogatory manner here. I use it rather as a descriptor for the triage process of GPs. GPs are effectively the people who often have the power to refer or deny treatment, diagnosis, or other assessments. They certainly do keep gates between the masses and the more advanced specialisms out there. Although the studies out there show only a 5-25% rate of missed diagnosis opportunities, they all seem to be concentrated in areas with relatively high density of GP practices. I imagine when one corrects for a lower density of GPs (i.e. a higher ratio of patients to GPs), that figure would rise dramatically. Certainly even the 5-25% figure is enough to back-up the anecdotal evidence that GPs don't seem to want to diagnose mental health.

Limited options
Let's be more charitable to GPs though. Let's assume that the GP is well trained and know all of the services available to them. Medication and referral to CBT are the standard within the NHS. Those are the core options open to a GP in assisting a patient with mental health issues.

There are peripheral services that exist but these can be a postcode lottery. So social prescribers, charities, support groups, etc. Even NAS has no groups in Merseyside from what I can make out, so for an adult looking for a support group for autism in Merseyside is likely to be out of luck. This is what I mean by a postcode lottery. Where you live defines the services available. [For the record here I do not mean to equate mental health and autism, I merely meant to present an example of postcode lottery]

It doesn't take much searching online to find a wide variety of accounts on the effectiveness of social prescribers. In my GP's practice it basically boiled down to 'do you need foodbank vouchers'. That was it. That was the 'support' a social prescriber offered me. In other areas with extensive support groups or charity activity they may be able to be more effective. 

What I fear that this leads to is that GPs will often prescribe anti-depressants with no treatment or management plan. I can't find a consensus from anywhere about usage of SSRIs long-term. There does appear to be two camps. One that is SSRIs are a way of managing depression lifelong. Another which appear to build a case for SSRIs being used to stabilise someone such that talking therapies can be more effective. So, again if you're a patient who feels 'fobbed off' with anti-depressants, I could see why a GP doesn't really have much of an idea of other courses of treatment and management.

And that doesn't take into account...
Autism. All of that is before we even consider the impact of autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, or basically any condition that might cause someone to experience the world in a 'non-typical' manner (if there even is such a thing as typical).

I guess what I'm saying here is that my theory is that the UK's NHS mental health provision is already so broken at its core that it isn't really working for those who are neurotypical. How in Hades can we expect it work well for those of us who don't fit into the 'normal' processes?

Wow that was more than I intended to write....I may have some resentment and issues bubbling away under the surface about the way I've experienced NHS and mental health. Apologies folks.